BOSTON—As the most important offensive player for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Phil Kessel is used to having every aspect of his game scrutinized in rigorous detail. Life under a microscope can be difficult, but Kessel has proven his ability to get through it, finishing this season with 20 goals after going without one in his first 10 games.

Losing the first game of a best-of-seven series is hardly ideal, but Kessel is not about to freak out over being down 1-0 to the Boston Bruins after the Maple Leafs’ 4-1 defeat on Wednesday night. Is there pressure? Absolutely. But Kessel is well acquainted with pressure, and knows how to deal with it.

Patrice Bergeron and the Bruins know doing the little things and playing their style will ultimately lead to success against the Maple Leafs. (AP Photo)

“You’ve just got to play the game,” Kessel said on Thursday after sitting out of Toronto’s practice at Boston University for what the team called a maintenance day. “Do the things you know how to do, and things will work out.”

Or maybe they won’t. After all, the Bruins are an excellent team trying to win the Stanley Cup for the second time in three years. Only one team can move on to the second round, even if both play their best. Boston was much closer to that level in Game 1 than Toronto was, but the Bruins also know that success requires an even-keeled approach.

For the Bruins, commitment to maintaining form regardless of results paid off in Game 1 against the Leafs. Boston had outshot its opponents 257-202 over its final seven regular-season games, but had lost five of those contests to surrender the No. 2 seed in the East to the Montreal Canadiens. There was no panic from Claude Julien’s team, and the Bruins’ possession-heavy game paid dividends with a 40-20 shot margin on Wednesday.

“When you play for a while in this league, you realize that if you keep plugging away, it’s going to go in at some point,” Bruins center Patrice Bergeron said. “You realize you’ve got to keep doing the same things, and I thought these games where we were good but not good enough, we had to be better, but there was still some strides in the right direction. That’s what we’ve said in this room, that yesterday was another step toward playing the right game in our style, and we’ve got to keep it going.”

The important thing that Bergeron noted was that Game 1 represented a “step toward playing the right game in our style,” not a perfect game, even though the Bruins dominated the proceedings. There is a temptation for fans and media to make sweeping declarations based on single playoff games, but for the men who play the game, even the playoffs have to be just another day at the office. It has to be, because that is the only way to bear the weight of the hopes of an entire city – or country.

“It’s what I’m used to doing,” Toronto forward Leo Komarov said. “It’s my work. I try to give 100 percent because I know I get paid for it. It’s like you coming over here to talk to me. You need to write something good. It’s the same thing out there. Every shift is important because you’ve got 20,000 people watching you, and millions on TV.”

Those millions of viewers watched the Leafs play a stinker on Wednesday night, but Toronto fans also saw their team lose eight games this season—one out of every six times they played—by three or more goals. The Leafs still made the playoffs. That is the mindset necessary to move on to the next game.

“It works both ways,” Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf said. “When you win a game, you’ve got to move forward, and when you lose a game, obviously, you’ve got to move forward, too. When you win one, you take the good from it, and when you lose, you learn from the mistakes that you made. That’s what we’re going to have to do.”

Or, you can do the exact opposite of that, but still have the same goal in mind.

“If you have guys that are capable of being critical of themselves (after a win) but also realize the positives amongst a loss, I think that’s a healthy thing to have,” Bruins defenseman Andrew Ference said. “You can’t beat yourself up after you lose games. There’s another team out there that’s playing hockey and tying just as hard.”

The obvious conflict in hockey, or any sport, is that only one of those teams can turn trying hard into victory. All any player can do is follow Kessel’s advice: play the game. Anything else is just noise.

“It’s up to me and I know what I’m doing out there,” Komarov said. “Yeah, we can f--- it up sometimes, but everybody does. I don’t feel any pressure at all.”